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Monday, May 15, 2006

How much do I hate riding a lifecycle at the gym without something to read?

So much so that during a recent workout I was even willing to thumb through the March issue of Internal Medicine World Report. Inside, I saw yet another example of a medical study whose headline and lead paragraph are almost sure to mislead the public. This was the headline I saw:

Moderate Coffee ConsumptionMay Keep Type 2 Diabetes at Bay

And here's a sentence from the article's first paragraph:

A new study published in Diabetes Care ... has found that even moderate consumption may lower the risk of diabetes in adults.

But only if you read the next-to-last paragraph will you be informed of this minor footnote:

Despite these results, lead investigator Rob. M. van Dam, PhD, of the Harvard School of Public Health in Boston, and (his) colleagues tried to dissuade physicians from thinking that coffee drinking may be a way to avoid diabetes.